One of the things we like least about the main TP site is that the home page isn’t particularly useful for subscribers, especially once they’ve logged in. It would be much more useful if it provided trip planning assistance, instead of just asking you to renew.
To address this, we’ve started designing a new Trip Dashboard (“dashboard”) that’s supposed to do two things:
- Provide a centralized place for all of your trip planning information
- Provide context-aware assistance for any trip planning tasks you have to do
What does “context-aware assistance” mean? One example is this: if you tell us there are 5 people in your family, then when you visit the hotels section, we should first show you those rooms that fit 5 people. Similarly, if you tell us your budget for lodging is under $200 per night, we should show you moderate and value resort choices before deluxes.
Besides that, this new dashboard also puts on one screen, links to your personalized touring plans, crowd tracker dates, discussions, trips, and lists of things to do.
Since this is release 1 of roughly 10, we’re focusing on basic design and making sure things are placed on the screen where you think they should be. Other, snazzier functions come later. A mobile version will come later, too.
We’d like to get up to 20 volunteers to test this new functionality on the site later this week. If you’re interested, post here. First come, first served.
Thanks!
Len